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A good laugh, like a good cry, has long been thought to be the right medicine at certain moments. Now scientists are exploring how regular laughing can do more than just put a smile on your face.
"After laughing, you have a relaxation response (in your body). Everything goes down—heart rate, blood pressure, your muscles relax," says Mary Bennett, DNSc, APRN-FNP, whose research has investigated how humor and laughter affect physical and psychological well-being.
Studies show that laughter can:
"We're starting to document that this (laughter's positive influence on health) isn't just an old wives' tale," says Bennett, who is director of the Western Kentucky University School of Nursing in Bowling Green, Kentucky. "It does seem to make a difference."
There's a difference, Bennett notes, between enjoying humor (a mental process) and humor response (such as outright laughing), a physical activity that triggers physiological reactions.
In one study, Bennett and her colleagues measured whether watching a funny video would affect the immune systems of a group of adult women. While stress levels went down for the group, "only the people who physically laughed out loud had an increase in natural-killer (NK) cell activity," she says. NK cells are frontline responders in the body's immune system. Low NK cell activity makes you more susceptible to disease and puts people with cancer or HIV at greater risk of death.
"If you're getting a good belly laugh every few minutes, you could be improving your immune function," Bennett says.
Although humor and laughter are two separate things, laughing because you think something is funny and learned laughter can cause the same positive physical responses. Most research on the benefits of laughing, however, has focused on natural laughter, rather than learned laughter.
First, because humor—especially belly-laugh-producing humor—isn't the same for everyone. Consider the range of what makes people laugh: scan the cable TV channels and you're likely to see one or two programs that cause you to chuckle out loud at least once. There are probably many more shows that you don't find funny at all, yet millions of people watch those programs and laugh heartily.
What's more, humor can't always be summoned on demand. When you're depressed, worried, sad or stressed out, humorous entertainment or conversation might not make you guffaw.
"Humor is so dependent upon our culture and our mood at the moment," says Judy L. Young, a laughter coach and educator in Wichita, Kansas, who coauthored a study of "purposeful aerobic laughter"—or laughter without humor. "We teach you how to laugh on your own, which is very helpful when people are in a place in life where they have nothing to laugh about."
The research Young and her coauthors conducted focused on a workplace laughter group that met for 15-minute sessions over 15 consecutive workdays. During the regimen, participants showed significant increases in optimism, self-awareness, positive emotions, social identification and more—gains they maintained even after the study ended.
"Laughter without humor can literally make you feel better, think better and function better," says Young.
Many of today's laughter groups have their roots in a practice called Laughter Yoga, which combines "laughter for no reason" exercises with yogic breathing. Begun by a physician in India, there are now Laughter Yoga clubs around the world.
Learning to laugh with a group is often easier, but Young contends that you can benefit from laughing by yourself for 15 minutes a day. Here's the laughter exercise she suggests:
The exercise may feel contrived at first, but your normal laugh will come, Young says. She's seen it work with the stressed-out people she teaches.
"We have gotten ourselves so overscheduled and overwhelmed that we forget to be like children. We forget to give ourselves permission to be happy, to smile," she says.
"This is one tool to put in your toolbox to make your life more rewarding and make you feel better."
